This book was brought to you by my ongoing tendency to assume that I’ll like an author if I like their spouse’s work. It’s actually not a bad system.
This book is deceptive and I don’t know if I would have grabbed it now if I’d known a bit more about the content and also I liked the story it told as much as the story it was pretending to be telling. 
Like - the end of the world as character exploration is a good genre and part of me wishes I grabbed something off my shelf with like slightly lower stakes and also, I mean, it worked out okay. And the things that he doesn’t quite say but let you imagine the connections between and the choice to open the book in 2010…it does a lot without doing a lot in the story and I’m surprised at how much it rewards reflection.

Knowledge is knowing that the world of the story is not a dystopia. Wisdom is recognizing that just because it is our world of 2010 doesn’t mean it’s not a dystopia. This is the kind of story where if you think the point is the reveal, you miss the point.

There is a LOT going on in this book, even leaving aside the usual “I know I read the first one, what happened” and the slow Celine Dion-ing* as the book continued and I remembered why I cared. 
It was a little darker than I wanted. I was surprisingly okay with Malini as a character and leader doing what she needed; there are ways in which the world betrays these characters that made the book—for all it was incredibly intricate—hard to read and hard to want to continue. At a certain point it felt like I wasn’t sure what they were actually fighting for. And the ways that the world gets pulled out from under the characters makes it hard to feel like I’m rooting for anyone and I want to root for my characters. 

———
*meaning it’s all coming back to me now

I mean, I didn't not like it.
I just...at no point did I feel particularly grabbed by the characters. I appreciated that Sebastian didn't make a big deal out the usual tropes, but it did leave this book somewhat bereft of things that felt like they mattered.
Idk, something about this one left me entirely uninterested and I wish I knew why beyond "eh, it happens".

It's been way too long since I experienced Dirty Computer so I've forgotten like a significant amount of the concept behind it and also I'm not sure it's necessary for the stories to make sense.
(I'm the 🎵 reader who never remembers anything 🎵 )
The way that the stories take place in the same world, but tell different stories is awesome and the hmm... evolution from cyberpunk science fiction to speculative fantasy in the way the stories imagine the world is super interesting. That the first one feels very grounded, not in reality or in real science, but in a willingness to commit to sciency-ness as a genre constraint. And each story after that gets progressively less interested in conforming to science fiction as a set of rules that confine the how of what's possible.
Which is kind of the point of being a Dirty Computer even if it means that you can't read the stories out of order.

I appreciate that Charles thinks this book is lighthearted because I found it deeply stressful in the best Austen fashion.
The degree to which money and respectability can ruin people and trap them is impressive.
Also shoutout to the inverse relationship in specific romance novels between how accepted a person is in society and how much they believe in consent.
Also an absolute round of applause for

having the Christian marrying a Jewish character agree to convert! There's always this inherent approval of intermarriage and this book just...the Jewish character says "look, I'm not particularly religious, but I'm Jewish and my family will be Jewish. <3

.

This was an interstitial book, with bits and pieces of it read while doing other things and so ideas and snatches of it stand out - the way Giovanni writes about love, about the physical objects and the doing for and making do that make up love.
And the stories of oppression and what it takes to just...survive. To hope in the universe that one day some child or child's child's or even further along with live and love and delight because you kept on.

I found Giovanni because someone posted her spider poem online and it immediately spoke to my soul. I'm not sure any of these caught me quite so utterly, but I appreciated them all.
(For those wondering, I'm talking about Allowables.) 

Book one: Down with the patriarchy! All hail the matriarchy!

Book two: Gender is a prison and I am chewing through the bars.

Book three: ...? idk, looking forward to finding out. 

In honor of re-learning Kashrut this year, we're reading about the importance of bugs.

And now I'm vaguely depressed about the future. I know the book was going for hopeful, but there's a lot to be sad about (other than how rarely we mow our lawn. Apparently we're good at some things) and a lot of change that is systemic and necessary and not in the short-term interests of those who want to hold on to money and power and I'm mad.
Bugs, though, man. Bugs are cool.

Do I make a candy joke? Do I call this novel saltwater taffy or is that the absolute wrong side of the US?

Anyway, sweet as saltwater taffy and utterly adorable story that upends a number of familiar rules of the genre, while playing right into the other ones. 

Particularly important was the "I'm not depressed because I stayed on land, I'm depressed because my brain works a certain way", which was just...an important resolution even if not a major plot point and a really nice change from "everything is the fault of the universe".

It was cute and I liked it.

This series. It's ABSURD. It's everything I loved as a teenager and then hated for years because it was consistently so poorly done, but then Liu shows up and absolutely slays the entire genre to the point that I could barely keep track of the characters and I did not care.
Liu's is very clear that his main influence is wuxia, but the series itself is also constantly asking the question: "what does it mean, philosophically speaking, to be a good leader?" and weighing everything that hangs in the balance. The narrative itself is a kind of weighing of the fish - when this happens, who or what does a leader become? What does it mean for a leader to be good?
And while Liu lays out the possible answers, he's equally aware of how impossible it is to answer that questions in specifics or in anything beyond the story itself that is, in all its 4000+ pages of complexity, the answer.
He also shares Neal Stephenson's gift for spending ages on technology without being extremely boring and using technology not as a macguffin, but as a tool that allows the characters to do what they all really want to do anyway. And he clearly has such fun with it.
Anyway, if you're looking for books that capture the joy of epic fantasy, but whose understanding of morality grew up as well, here it is.